


Repent and Repeat (King AU)

by SimplySyra



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Achievement City, Achievement Hunters, Alternate Universe - Achievement Hunter Kings, Mad King Ryan, The Red King - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4179651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplySyra/pseuds/SimplySyra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Red King rises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Repent and Repeat (King AU)

He floats, cold and silent, as if suspended in the bottom depths of an endless glacial lake. Nothing but these frozen depths. The dark so thick that he cannot feel, cannot even exist. He has lost his body somewhere along length of his long and lonely plunge. Now he drifts, unshackled from the weight of flesh and bone, gently lulled by the calming rhythm of a ceaseless downward spiral.

But then their voices reach him, desperate, many. They are a single faint strand of light in that sweet and tideless black. He finds his fingers, extends his arm, pulls himself hand over hand up that feebly flickering rope into the light.

He bursts forth into an agonizing clutch of pain that pounds against his skull and presses knives into every tender length of his newly awakened body. Blood, his own, copper-salty against his tongue. Wounds like angry red mouths howling for his attention. And the screams. Not voices. _Screams_ like shards of glass tearing through the crimson-gray fog of his barely conscious mind.

“Children. They’re so loud.” The words strike him like whips across his face. He blinks up, finding his body chained to the ground. And there on his throne lounges a dark and loathsome presence.

“I endeavored to take the elderly, too,” says the Mad King, casually twisting the Red One’s sword in a disinterested hand. “But, you know, they’re all so slow. The children proved faster and so they lived. For now.”

“Those are _my_ subjects,” the Red One spits, breathless, weakening as his life oozes out around him in a steady crimson drip. “How dare you? How _dare_ –”

“Did you know, little king,” interrupts the other, “that they have a sculpture of you in the sanctuary installed next to this throne room? Right next to the Maker. It’s a little offensive, really. Normally I’m the one they depict at his side. However….”

The Red One’s sword hisses through the air, burying its tip into a solid marble column. The grin spreads across the Mad One’s face like blood over water.

“Given some of my recent exploits, I can understand why there may be less incentive to depict me as such.”

The Red One does not answer because it is then that he smells the smoke. Black, pungent, rolling out from the sanctuary doors and filling the throne room with the scent of fear and pain. Wildly he struggles, thrashing like a mind-sick creature against his iron bonds.

“Why would you do this,” he cries, voice nearly drowned by the weeping screams of his trapped subjects as they burn in the next room over. “Why would anyone ever do this?”

“Because I wanted to see what you would do.” The Mad One leans forward, fingers laced, body taut with curious anticipation. “So, little king. What are you going to do?”

He does something.

He sends the strength of his desperation deep into the core of his anger, lets it take root there, lets it grow into a wild wailing bramble that shoots up through his limbs and into his chest where it explodes like the violent vengeance of a volcano.

His skin splits open, black thorns bursting through the walls of his veins in a vicious cascade of blood. The bones of his wrists crack and snap, pushed out of place by a sea of spiny vines that bursts from his arms and fills the room, ensnaring his prey in a tangling, treacherous trap.

He bleeds. He howls.

He girds himself in the flowing crimson robes of his rage and his resentment.

He is blood. He is pain. He is Red.

Reality trickles back into the folds of his mind like water through sand. Bit by bit, drop by drop. Drops. Drops of blood clinging to the curves of his face and body. He is drenched in it. His own. Pins and needles, hundreds of tiny weeping holes now devoid of thorns or power.

“I’m afraid your tantrum destroyed the sanctuary.” The rasping words fall from above him like a slow and weary drizzle. He tilts his head, focuses blurring eyes on the Mad One transfixed to the ceiling, his entire body pierced through and held in place by spears of thorns and bramble.

“They’re all dead,” The Mad One says. “Crushed beneath the rubble.”

And it’s true. Shattered marble columns and dusty splintered timber stand as sorry tombstones to mark their tiny graves. Not a single sorrowful voice reaches out to him from that silent mountain of stone.

The Red King shrieks, collapses to the ground to fold in on himself until he is nothing more than a crumpled, weeping ball of pain and grief.

Rose petals flutter silently through the hallowed hall on hidden currents, whirling and whispering their way to the ground like a delicate snow of blood.

The Mad King smiles even as his eyes drift shut and the life seeps from his body. “I knew you had it in you, little king.”


End file.
